


lush life

by rainingover



Series: young love, money talks [2]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Face-Fucking, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Summer Vacation, Wealth, sad rich boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:48:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24168367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingover/pseuds/rainingover
Summary: Keeping up appearances is a full time job when you’re young, loaded, and reckless, and pretending not to be in love with your best friend.(Johnny's been in love with Jaehyun since before Ibiza.This is his story.)
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Series: young love, money talks [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1744315
Comments: 29
Kudos: 424





	lush life

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [生·情](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29133726) by [OceanofJade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanofJade/pseuds/OceanofJade)



> i couldn't stop thinking about intoxicated johnny & how he feels about jaehyun, and this happened.
> 
> you don’t have to read the previous story but it will probably help to understand some references here. or you could read this one & then that one. either works!
> 
> maybe there'll be more stories in this verse, idk.

There has always been something between them, a chemistry that he doesn’t share with any of his other friends. A chemistry he is pretty sure he hasn’t even shared with most of the people he’s dated. It’s an easiness, a quiet sort of understanding between them that he appreciates and that he craves when Jaehyun isn’t around. 

Johnny spends too long thinking about what it would be like to bite down on the sensitive skin of his inner thighs to be able to deny his feelings for Jaehyun. Still, it’s easier to pretend not to have them, to keep things vague and hazy in his mind.

Except, when they go to Ibiza for the summer, things become more concrete. 

The month is made up of consuming copious amounts of alcohol, making countless pointless purchases and being seen with lot of women. Women who assume he’s straight, because— because why wouldn’t he be? He _is,_ technically. He’s never said he isn’t out loud. He contemplates taking a girl back to the villa after a night at Ushuaia but when she disappears back into the crowd with her friend at the end of the night, he doesn’t bother to follow her. He doesn’t really want to sleep with her. Still, he makes sure that the photos he posts to Instagram that night include one of her hanging off his arm. 

Keeping up appearances is a full time job when you’re young, loaded and reckless, and pretending not to be in love with your best friend.

Their villa that they rent on Ibiza is so pretentious it’s almost funny. It’s ostentatious,Taeil comments when they show him the listing before they fly out. There are crystal sculptures in the foyer and two walk-in closets. There are three freestanding baths in the three marble bathrooms. There is a minimalist chandelier that, according to the write-up, cost more than Johnny’s last year in college in the guest bathroom and there is a sex swing in the master bedroom that they photograph and send to all of their friends. 

Johnny takes that room, but he never uses the swing. Not to fuck anyone on, anyway. 

Johnny might be in love with Jaehyun, but that doesn’t matter. He can pretend he isn’t because he’s always been good at pretending. He pretends not to hate his father. He pretends not to hate the fact that people know his name. Johnny, walking fucking life and soul of every party, hates being so well-known. But he _loves_ pretending not to. It’s like acting, and people like him are damn _good_ at acting. They all act like their lives are perfect, like _they’re_ perfect, and they all keep up each other’s pretence, like an unspoken brotherhood of bullshit. 

It’s funny, in a sad kind of way, he thinks. 

The problem, he finds, is that most of the people who know his name don’t care about his company, they care his wealth, his status, and he gets that—money is magnetic—but it doesn’t make it any more palatable. Money, Johnny finds, tends to make people less attractive regardless of their beauty. Their personalities usually mark their skin and make them hard to look at. 

Not Jaehyun, though. 

Jaehyun is beautiful outside and in, which makes him fucking _gorgeous_. Jaehyun is low-hanging fruit, straight from the vine: new and perfect and tempting. Johnny wants to grab and take something for himself, but Jaehyun is always out of reach, at least that’s how it feels watching Jaehyun talk closely with a girl in a ruby-red two piece while he stands two feet away and drowns his feelings in one, two, three shots of vodka. 

On the last weekend of their vacation, they pay a sickening amount to book a cabana at Blue Merlin beach club and almost lose their reservation when they turn up late. Johnny is hungover, but that’s par for the course in Summer, especially abroad. Euros don’t feel like real money and it feels like he’s playing a part in an old movie, static at the edges of his vision.

They order bottles, and Johnny lies down on the bed, out of the heat of the sun (which is not helping his hangover) and closes his eyes. He thinks about the night before, about Jaehyun in a loose dress shirt, unbuttoned to midway down his chest. He thinks about Jaehyun and about the way his eyes lit up when they watched the sunrise, half-sober and sleepy, as they walked back to the villa. He thinks about the glistening expanse of skin on show when Jaehyun peels off his t-shirt every morning and they head out onto the patio to plan their day, and he thinks about the way that Jaehyun’s bottom lip might feel between his teeth, the way his thighs might flex underneath his grip. 

He thinks about Jaehyun’s low, breathy laugh, and wonders how it might sound if Johnny was pressed up close against him. 

Sometimes he goes even further, wonders what Jaehyun tastes like— his mouth, his skin, his cock. He wonders what his come tastes like, his _come._ God, he’s so fucking into Jaehyun it’s actually laughable! But he’s good at pretending not to be, so right now he lies still, closes his eyes and listens to the music playing over the speakers, the voices of other people with too much money to spend and the sound of glass clinking metal as Jaehyun pours him a drink. Johnny lifts his hand and takes the glass, which is cold and wet with condensation, and his mouth waters. To be honest, he feels like shit, but there’s no rest for the wicked, so he’ll continue to drink until his headache is gone and replaced by the cloying heat of being drunk and being with Jaehyun. 

“Sit up,” Jaehyun says. “You can’t drink it lying down, you’ll choke. Or worse, you’ll spill it.” 

Johnny grins at him and opens his eyes against the sun as he sits up. “To another day in paradise,” Johnny says, and he drains the glass, barely registering the burn as the liquor slides down his throat. 

Across the pool, someone jumps into the water and a group of girls squeal at the spray of water that follows the jump. The sound goes right through him.

Jaehyun matches him drink for drink, and they’ve finished a bottle of vodka within the first forty minutes of their residence at the club. Johnny’s hangover hides somewhere at the back of his skull and he finds himself smiling more, laughing more, starting up conversations with people he’s seen at clubs over the last few weeks. He’s never bothered to learn their names. They aren’t important to him, and he knows he isn’t important to them either. 

Jaehyun watches him with a smile as he orders another bottle and tips the server way more than necessary. Johnny turns to Jaehyun afterwards and says, “I’ll never get bored of this,” but he’s lying.

They’re both already bored of it, they’ve been bored of it all for a long while now. Being rich isn’t a novelty when it’s all you know. It’s a responsibility they didn’t ask for and that consumes their whole personality, and Johnny sometimes wonders if he’ll ever be anything more than crisp banknotes and good hair.

Johnny also wonders if Jaehyun would kiss him back if he initiated something with him. Not now though, not _here_ , he’d stop things if Johnny did it here. Jaehyun is the cautious one out of the two of them. He’s the one who reminds Johnny to put a limit on his tab at the bar before they get too wasted. He’s the one that carries the sunscreen. He’s the one who keeps Johnny grounded, even if he doesn’t know that. He wouldn’t kiss Johnny here, in a beach club on Ibiza. But maybe, one day, he will. 

Johnny pushes his hair back and motions to Jaehyun to pass him their second bottle of vodka. He drinks it straight from the bottle, and when it burns his throat it feels good. When it starts to cool down, day becoming early evening, they leave the cabana and dance up on the veranda near the DJ booth, a bottle each in hand. Security approach them, say, “No glass up here” and try to force them to pour their bottles into tacky plastic alternatives. Johnny evades them, pushes into the crowd and catches the hand of a girl who has been watching him with doe-eyes and a pussycat smile. When he turns to find Jaehyun, he’s no longer with him. 

Jaehyun is back at the cabana, lounging on the bed and looking like he’s the prince of this tiny nation. His bottle is back in the bucket beside their bed and he’s sipping from a glass instead: civilised, regal, the better of the two of them. 

Johnny crawls up onto the bed next to him. His limbs feel heavy, like he’s wearing weights on them. His stomach is in knots. “What are you doing back here?” he asks Jaehyun.

“Thinking.” Jaehyun smiles. Soft, hazy, drunk. 

“What about?” Johnny leans back against the cushions. 

“Nothing in particular.” Jaehyun passes Johnny the glass and he drinks from the spot Jaehyun’s lips had just been. His lashes are impossibly long in this light. Seductive. Johnny wants to kiss him, hold him down, lick into his mouth. Johnny wonders how it would feel to fuck him, to push inside right to the hilt and just _feel_ it, how hot, how tight it would be. 

“Hello?”

“Huh?” Johnny blinks and then he’s back in reality, Jaehyun’s body next to him, rather than underneath. 

“I said, thank you for asking me to come away with you.” Jaehyun’s voice is low, throaty, his lips soft. He’s ripe peaches and fresh cream, and he’s the silver spoon on the side of the bowl too. 

Johnny just flashes him a signature grin. “Who else would I ask?” It isn’t a question exactly, they know there is no one else. “You’re my best friend.”

“Did you kiss that girl?” Jaehyun asks him. 

Johnny tries to read between the lines but he’s too drunk to. “Yeah,” he lies. “Of course I did."

That night they go back to their villa almost five thousand euros poorer, but this is a vacation and euros don’t feel like real money. No money feels like real money to Johnny, not really, not like he knows it should. And he knows that’s fucked up, but he tries not to think about it too much. 

Instead, he thinks about Jaehyun on his knees, Jaehyun lying on his stomach, ass in the air. He thinks about the way that Jaehyun’s hair falls over his eyebrows when it hasn’t been cut in a while. 

They sleep together in the master most nights, without reason or excuse, and the bed is big enough for it to not feel like slow torture most of the time, but Johnny is good at pretending, so it doesn’t matter much even when it does.

  
  
  
  


When they talk about Ibiza to Mark and Yuta, the stories are embellished with crude additions that sound like lies but are believed by their friends regardless. 

Johnny recounts a night of tantric sex on the swing in his room and Jaehyun doesn’t call him out, just watches the conversation unfold with a wry smile on his face. Neither of them contradict the other, and neither of them mention the fact they’re spinning tall tales. It’s not like they lie about anything else: the money spent, the alcohol consumed, the parties, the heat, the sand and sea, that’s all real. 

The photos in his phone are the real snapshots of real moments between them. Johnny has a hell of a lot of photos of Jaehyun in his, but he pretends he doesn’t.

  
  
  
  
  


They don’t go on vacation the next Summer. 

Johnny buys his house with his father’s money and he moves into it in late May. Jaehyun comes over and hardly ever leaves, and sometimes Johnny thinks he might catch Jaehyun watching him swimming, and the sun is hot, but it’s nothing compared to how that makes him feel.

Johnny becomes more certain that Jaehyun is watching him swim as the weeks go by and his mind runs away with this knowledge. It uses it against him, winds him up and up until it’s the only thing he can think about at all. He thinks about Jaehyun watching him, and then he closes his eyes and imagines that it is Jaehyun's hand on his cock as he works himself over in bed. Then it’s Jaehyun’s mouth, then it’s his own hand but Jaehyun is there, on the chair across the room, watching him get off. They all do the job. 

And maybe it’s lack of sleep, or it’s the heat, or it’s the smell of the sunscreen on his skin that reminds Johnny of last year, on the cabana, when he’d thought—just for a moment—that maybe it would be okay if he leaned over and kissed Jaehyun, but whatever it is that flicks the switch in his brain, it flicks it on permanently, and Johnny starts to think he might go crazy if he doesn’t act on it soon. 

He jerks off to a photo of Jaehyun in low-slung shorts, stretched out on a sun-lounger on Las Salinas beach from the summmer before, and he thinks about that stupid fucking sex swing and how he’s been obsessed with Jaehyun for well over a year.

Jaehyun comes over every day and it’s getting hotter and hotter, and Jaehyun won’t stop mentioning the weather and how humid it is, and how he he can’t get any respite from it all. 

Something has to _give_ , so Johnny does what Johnny does best, and he pretends this is all just something very casual that doesn’t mean much at all. 

“It’s too hot,” he says, offhand and flippant. “It’s like there’s something under my skin. I’m restless.”

Jaehyun agrees. He’s easy, malleable. He’s too hot as well, of course he is. He gets into the pool. 

The tension is tangible. Johnny can feel it fizzing inside of him. He feels it right around his throat like a hand. He wonders if anyone’s wanted to fuck someone as much as he wants to fuck Jaehyun and whether Jaehyun’s ever wanted to fuck someone this much. He doesn’t want to think about Jaehyun fucking other people, though.

They haven’t gone away, but it still feels like right here is their personal island for the summer: most days it’s just them and the sun and the never ending humidity. And maybe you can’t repeat the past, but you can try to, and Johnny knows that deep down he’s trying to replicate the summer before, when it was the two of them in a Spanish villa, pretending to want to bring girls back and never doing it. Except, he doesn’t want to repeat last summer, not exactly, because he wants _more_ than that. 

Jaehyun floats in the water, serene and gorgeous, and Johnny’s aching inside, weighed down with lust and regret, and if he doesn’t make a move now he might just drown instead. 

“It’s a weird kinda summer, huh?” he says, his voice barely sounding like his own as it echoes off the water, and then he kisses Jaehyun. 

Almost as soon as it starts it comes to an abrupt end. Hyuck calls him, and Johnny pretends to not be completely fucking out of his _mind_ with desire while his friends invade their space with champagne and cigars. 

They don’t mention what happened, but they do it again. 

  
  
  
  


Johnny is good at pretending, and he starts to wonder if Jaehyun is too. Because Jaehyun kisses him breathless and then excuses it all on the cloying weather, as if sticky heat can be to blame for all and anything they do with each other. 

Jaehyun’s fingers tremble as he massages sunscreen into Johnny’s back, and Johnny’s hard, his cock painful against his thigh as Jaehyun straddles him on the sun lounger. Every tiny movement of Jaehyun’s hands goes straight to his cock, like he’s hotwired to react to anything Jaehyun does. Jaehyun can't know, he thinks, _surely_ he can’t realise the effect he’s having, but maybe he just hasn’t noticed, because he’s skittish today, unfocused and tense. 

The tension dissipates when they kiss again, Jaehyun’s tongue in his mouth and his skin hot to the touch, and it’s like he’s watching an old movie on a grainy screen: jagged edges and a low buzz of sound as Jaehyun moves against him and moans when Johnny licks at the pulse point on his neck. Johnny tastes fresh cream, strawberries, and vermouth, thinks of that villa, that ridiculous villa and the bed they shared. In reality Jaehyun tastes of sunscreen and perspiration, but Johnny’s mind supplies the sweetness and the citrus, a tart aftertaste that makes him want to come hard and fast down Jaehyun’s throat. 

When Jaehyun pulls back, pupils blown and mouth glossy with spit, and says, “Want me to blow you?” Johnny can hardly believe his luck. He nods, he swears, he rests his hand at the back of Jaehyun’s head and he watches him, the slow drag of his tongue over his lips when he first pulls Johnny’s shorts down, the fan of his eyelashes against his cheeks when he lowers his head completely. He watches his cock disappear into his best friend's mouth, between lips that don’t taste of strawberries, but do all the same, and he wonders if he will ever be able to think of anything but this moment ever again. 

The sun beats down on his shoulders as Jaehyun works him over like he’s been waiting for this moment. Maybe Johnny is just imagining things, but he is sure that Jaehyun wants this as much as he does, like it just needed Johnny to pull him back onto the sun lounger and look him dead in the eye for him to give into his inhibitions. It’s so fucking hot, it feels better than Johnny has ever imagined it could. He’s been blown before, countless times, but they’ve never felt like his whole soul is being sucked out of him. Which is a weird kind of feeling, but fuck it’s _good_. 

“I’m gonna come soon,” he warns Jaehyun, and Jaehyun acknowledges this, raises his eyes to meet Johnny’s just for a second, but he doesn’t stop, just keeps going, his tongue soft as he laps at the underside of Johnny’s cock, and Johnny almost _sobs_ with the knowledge that Jaehyun wants him to come in his mouth. Johnny gets this urge to pull Jaehyun’s hair, but he doesn’t do it, he couldn't even if he tried because his limbs don’t belong to him anymore and he’s floating on air and he’s coming with rhythmic jerks of his hips, filling Jaehyun’s mouth, his throat. The knowledge that Jaehyun wants to feel it on his tongue makes Johnny feel weak at the knees, light-headed and blissful. There’s something so intimate about watching the person he loves swallow his come that it almost brings tears to his eyes. 

Afterwards, Johnny stares into the sun and waits for Jaehyun to say something. Jaehyun looks kind of dazed when he stands up. He looks like Johnny feels. He doesn’t say much, though. He just mutters something about having to go to an anniversary dinner, and Johnny barely hears the words. His cock is still wet with his best friend's spit. 

It isn’t until Jaehyun has gone that Johnny really registers anything other than the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears. Jaehyun’s parents had a winter wedding, he knows this because there’s a portrait of them on their wedding day in December up in Jaehyun’s family home hallway that he’s seen before. They had a winter wedding, so the anniversary is a lie, and Jaehyun has gone.

Johnny drinks by himself and then jerks off in the shower, imagining his hand is Jaehyun’s wet mouth. He feels a bit like crying, but he doesn’t allow himself to. It’s all a bit of a blur.

Maybe this is all just sunstroke, he thinks, but the imagine of Jaehyun between his legs is too vivid for it to be a fever dream. 

Jaehyun comes round again two days later and moves his sun lounger further away from Johnny’s under the guise of wanting to catch the midday sun. Johnny watches him sunbathe and wonders what he’s thinking and if he’s regretting what they’re doing. Jaehyun says, “It’s been a weird summer so far,” and waits for Johnny to agree.

When Johnny gets into the pool, Jaehyun hesitates for a moment but he slips into the water behind Johnny all the same, and then Johnny has his hands on Jaehyun’s waist and his tongue in Jaehyun’s mouth. He pins Jaehyun against the wall of the pool and gets him off under the water, one hand working him over in broad strokes as he runs the other up over Jaehyun’s stomach to his chest Jaehyun squirms a little when Johnny pinches at his nipple, so Johnny does it again. Jaehyun likes it, he must do, because he groans— a low throaty sound that goes straight to Johnny’s cock— and grinds close to Johnny’s body. 

Jaehyun buries his face into the crook of Johnny’s neck when he’s close, scrapes his teeth against Johnny’s skin and mumbles incoherent things, and even though they’re just messing around in the pool behind his house at three in the afternoon, Johnny thinks that this might be how love feels, at its most base, most fucked up glory. 

It’s not like Johnny has a lot to work with here: he's never been in a relationship he’d consider serious and after his mother left when he was six and a half, he grew up with his father and an ever-rotating string of fiancés, none of whom seemed to ever smile with happy eyes. He thinks it might be because of this that he loves to do things that make the people he cares about genuinely happy. This is why he hosts the parties he does, this is why he took Jaehyun away for the summer. This is why he lets his friends come and go to his condo over the summer even when he’s feeling like lying in a cold room by himself. 

In the Summer house, which Johnny finds an ironic name for the small structure behind the pool, since the entire place is fit for summer, Jaehyun sucks him off again, and this time Johnny doesn’t hold back at all. At first, though, it’s an accident; he thrusts a little too hard, a little too quickly, and Jaehyun makes a noise like he’s being strangled. 

“Fuck, sorry.” Johnny stills himself, gripping the arms of the chair he’s sitting in, his knuckles almost white. The ceiling fan whirs overhead. He watches as Jaehyun pulls off him and takes a deep breath in. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to do-”

“I liked it,” Jaehyun says. His eyes are glassy, his mouth is swollen. “I liked it. Do it—do it again.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?” Johnny isn’t prepared to hurt him, doesn’t want him to choke if he doesn’t _want_ to.

“I want it.” Jaehyun’s cheeks are pink. He doesn’t look away. “ _Please_. Fuck my face.”

Johnny nods, lifts his hands from the armrests and flexes his fingers before he gets cramp in them from how tightly he’s been holding on. The breeze from the fan on his skin is cold, a stark contrast to the sweltering heat outside. A stark contrast to the hotness of Jaehyun’s waiting mouth. Jaehyun wraps his hand around the base of his cock and slips his mouth back over the head, his tongue flat sticking out as he lowers his head.

Johnny remembers how to move, even though his brain is short circuiting. He bucks his hips up as steady as he can, in and out, until he picks up a rhythm, and then he pushes further, fucks into Jaehyun’s mouth until his cock hits right at the back of his throat. Jaehyun’s face is buried between his legs now, his nose against Johnny’s skin, right against the very light stubble that’s grown since he shaved a couple of days before, and he’s making these noises as Johnny fucks him, these guttural, moaning noises that vibrate against the head of his cock. It feels amazing. It’s the best head he’s ever had, it’s the best head _anyone’s_ ever had. Probably. 

He slides his fingers in Jaehyun’s hair, which is still damp from the pool, and uses the grip for leverage as he thrusts into his mouth, harder and faster until it’s so messy there’s little rhythm left. He holds Jaehyun's head still and fucks harder, and Jaehyun's nails dig into his thigh where he's gripping. 

"Still ok?" Johnny asks through gritted teeth, pulls off again so Jaehyun can catch his breath.

"So good." Jaehyun wipes spit from his mouth. "More."

Johnny goes for it again, keeps going until he feels the scrape of Jaehyun's teeth on the upper side of Johnny’s cock and an obscene wet noise from the back of Jaehyun’s throat as Johnny tugs on his hair, and it’s incredible— it feels so intimate and so _dirty_ it’s like he’s been turned inside out, and his whole body shakes when he comes. 

Jaehyun sits on the floor in front of him, wet mouthed and breathing heavily, and jerks himself off quickly with his eyes closed. Johnny promises himself that next time he’ll suck Jaehyun off, but right now he’s too boneless to move. Plus, watching Jaehyun like this is the best comedown he could imagine.

They never really speak about these afternoons; they happen, they shower and then they pour themselves another drink, text their friends, put on their sunglasses. Johnny wonders if Jaehyun can tell he’s been in love with him forever and whether that scares him as much as it scares Johnny. 

Jaehyun goes home for a whole weekend and Johnny misses him so much he feels dizzy. But he drinks more champagne and orders more Spanish furniture and it dulls the ache for a while, in a perverse sort of way. He knows it won’t solve the problem, but that’s never been what his family is about. His father always said, “if you can’t fix something, you act like it’s fixed anyway,” and Johnny understands that now, as much as he despises being anything like his father.

  
  
  


He hosts a party for Mark’s birthday a couple of weeks later, because it’s the obvious thing to do.

Mark’s had a rough year, and he deserves a stupidly expensive celebration, and Johnny isn’t spending his money on his future because he doesn’t like to think about what that might entail (because he is scared it will be empty smiles, cold cash and a disillusioned outlook on why family means), so Johnny spends it on Mark. It makes sense to him, and he thinks Jaehyun understands the sentiment, even if he does eye the giant cake the caterers are bringing in with wry amusement. 

“It was the biggest cake they could do in the time they had,” Johnny tells him. Jaehyun’s mouth opens and then closes it again. 

“It’ll be fun. Mark will fucking love it!” Johnny says. He doesn’t know why he feels the need to justify his splurge. He doesn’t usually, not to anyone. But what Jaehyun thinks matters to him. Jaehyun matters to him. 

“I know he will.” Jaehyun lies back on the big, curtained, sunbed Johnny has bought that reminds him of the from their cabana at Blue Marlin last summer and looks up at the sky. 

Around them, the world goes on. The caterers set up the cake and the table with the champagne waterfall thing on it that Johnny only asked for because it reminds him of a movie, and the sun beats down overhead and bathes Jaehyun in a golden glow. Perspiration sits at his hairline and on his upper lip as he sighs deeply. “It’s so hot,” he mumbles, and Johnny has to excuse himself before he does something dumb in front of all of the staff. 

The party is good because the guests all smile with their eyes, and it makes Johnny feel like he has purpose for a while. Plus there are just enough people there for Johnny to feel like he can breathe. The more people that surround him, the less he feels like he’s being watched by animals waiting to pounce on him for favours and recognition— the prestige of tagging Johnny Seo in an Instagram post or adding him to their phone book. It’s exhausting, but drinking copious amounts of champagne usually gets him through it. That and watching Jaehyun laughing with their friends. 

When Jaehyun smiles with his eyes, Johnny feels like everything he’s done is worthwhile. Tonight, though, he struggles to find Jaehyun in the party and when he does locate him after fifteen minutes, Jaehyun is out by the pool all alone. He looks like marble, like he’s been crafted slowly.

His eyes are downcast, sullen. He isn’t smiling. 

“Come inside, I’m gonna get on the decks and DJ my own party,” Johnny tells him, and when he’s up there, headphones on and drink raised, grinning down at fifty people who may or may not genuinely care about him, he catches sight of Jaehyun in the crowd, smiling up at him. That smile makes the whole night, the clean-up cost, and the hangover the next morning worthwhile.

  
  
  
  


As the weather continues to get hotter, they hook up more and more, and each time feels more intense than the last. Johnny sucks Jaehyun off underneath the veranda as the sun sets one day, and Jaehyun whines in a way Johnny has never heard before. Jaehyun is relaxed, he's casual, he's not a whiner. Except he _is_. He whines, he asks Johnny to fuck his face, he says the summer is weird everytime Johnny kisses him. These are all truths.

It’s like a dream, the sort that Johnny knows they’ll have to wake up from, but the summer rolls on and Johnny will take whatever Jaehyun gives him, so he initiates kisses in the pool and leaves marks on Jaehyun’s skin in the summer house. He gets to recognise little, intimate things like the way that Jaehyun becomes more pliable, softer and eager, the closer he is to coming, and the way the sensitive skin on his inner thighs tastes afterwards. He never thought he’d actually get to learn that. 

He also now knows what it feels like to slide his palm over Jaehyun’s ass, under his shorts, and he knows what it’s like to put two fingers into Jaehyun’s open mouth, to feel his tongue lap at them and cover them with spit. He even knows what it’s like to push said fingers inside of Jaehyun’s ass and feel him tense around them. 

He replays the noises that Jaehyun makes while he’s fucking him on his fingers over and over in his head, and he’s dizzy with the knowledge that Jaehyun _loves_ it. 

“It’s a weird summer,” they tell each other afterwards. 

Johnny doesn’t know what the words even mean anymore. 

  
  
  
  


Johnny’s father shows up on a Friday afternoon, reeking of infidelity and disapproval. “So this is where you’ve been holed up all Summer?” He stands in the cool foyer of the house and turns up his nose, as if Johnny’s living in a cardboard box and not a house in the hills that no one but the top 5% could afford. “This side of town is—hmm, it’s tackier than I remembered.”

“Thanks, I’m glad to hear you like the place.” Johnny hasn’t got the patience for his father’s personal brand of bitterness. “Thanks for popping round.”

“I think Genevieve is going to leave me.” His dad sways a little on his feet. He must be drunk, as well as mean, Johnny thinks. That’s his future, right there. Or it _could_ be. It won’t be, he’ll make sure of it.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. He isn’t, he barely knows his father’s latest girlfriend, but he’s good at pretending.

“They only leave in the end,” his father says. He has narrow, angry, eyes. “Everyone you love will leave you, son. They won’t love you back. No one gives a crap. Remember that.”

Johnny doesn’t react. “Thanks Dad,” he says. An uneasy, prickling feeling settles under his skin and it isn’t the heat. “Give me your keys, I’ll drive you home.”

“I can drive.” His father looks at him like he doesn’t recognise him, like he’s nothing at all. 

“You’re drunk.” Johnny steps forward, hand outstretched and waiting for his father to give him the car keys. 

“So? So what?” His father hands him the keys in the end and stagers back towards the front door. “Did I tell you Genevieve is leaving? Just like your mother. She didn’t love either of us,” he mutters.

Johnny breathes in through his nose. He has a headache and it’s not from the heat. After he drops his father off home, he goes over to Yuta’s and gets stupid drunk on tequila. 

When he heads back to his place the next day, he thinks about his father’s pathetic hatred and he thinks about his mother leaving, and then he thinks about the whir of the ceiling fan in the summer house and the way Jaehyun looks on his knees.

Jaehyun is due round soon, and he just wants to sink into the lush head rush that is being close to him. It’s not even about the sex, not really, it’s just _him_. Johnny heads outside and lies by the pool in silence until Jaehyun arrives and joins him and they stay there, lying side by side on their sunloungers, the sun directly overhead, until it starts to go dark, and Jaehyun leaves again. 

  
  
  


Another week crawls by in the never ending heatwave that is life now. The air is heavy. The air is thick and Johnny wonders if lust can manifest itself into a suffocating sort of feeling, because this feels close to it, like lust is a poison and it’s sitting in the air.

Jaehyun’s bronzed skin is hot to touch and his eyes seem to burn into Johnny’s when they meet across the pool. 

_Everyone you love will leave you. They won’t love you back._ His father’s words echo in his mind. 

Johnny drinks vermouth on the patio and watches Jaehyun lying out on the grass. Jaehyun laughs into his phone when Doyoung calls him and Johnny drinks more vermouth, because it reminds him of last summer and last summer was the precipice of all of this. 

Before he started whatever it is that is happening between them, Johnny could imagine a future in which they were together and it was real. But now he’s known what it’s like to hold Jaehyun while he comes, now he’s held his hand as they fall asleep drowsily in the summer house on blistering hot afternoons. Now _is_ the future, and he’s still _pretending_.

He doesn’t want to pretend, so he asks Jaehyun to stay over, and he thinks, _now it will be real_. But then he remembers his father’s words again, and they resonate somewhere at the back of his mind. He thinks of his mother leaving eighteen years ago. He thinks of his father’s failed relationships and about Jaehyun with glassy eyes and mussed up hair, on the floor of the summer house, and then he pours a drink.

He calls Hyuck and asks him for the address of the party he’d invited them to that night, and he backs out of being honest. 

“It’s been a weird, hot, summer,” he tells Doyoung that night. “I’m starting to mix up what’s real and what isn’t.”

“Is this about Jaehyun?” Doyoung asks. He has a look in his eye that says he doesn’t need an answer so Johnny doesn’t answer him. Instead, he watches Jaehyun throw back his head and down his drink, and then does the same himself.

Jaehyun doesn’t stay over that night, or any night for a long while after that, and it’s like there’s been a shift in the axis of the earth, like it’s angled closer to the sun than ever before. 

Jaehyun spends less time on the sunlounger next to him and more time sitting between Mark and Yuta, and Johnny laughs and drinks, and shares his home with his friends, and he looks out for their smiles to check that they reach their eyes.

Johnny doesn’t check Jaehyun’s eyes and he isn't sure if it’s because he’s scared that Jaehyun won’t look happy at their distance or that he’s scared he _will_. 

Johnny buys more Spanish furniture and tracks the airfreight all the way across the ocean on the app on his phone.

When it arrives, it’s been weeks since he touched Jaehyun, and he guesses it might be for the best for both of them. 

  
  


It’s September when the weather turns. Jaehyun says, “I’m not in the mood to party tonight,” so they don’t go over to the party on Taeil’s boat. They just lie there and watch the sky above them turn dull where the clouds have enveloped the sun. 

The brief respite from the soaring, focused heat of the sun is like breathing for the first time, but the air is still thick regardless. Johnny feels the pang of lust deep in his belly again when he looks at Jaehyun. It’s never really gone away. He looks at Jaehyun and he looks at the clouds above them, and he thinks, _they won’t love you back,_ but today he finds it doesn’t stick. Today he wonders if maybe his father is just as full of shit as his mother clearly thought he was. 

When it starts to rain, their first instinct is to escape it and to watch it pass from the house. But then Jaehyun goes back outside, he gets into the pool, and— and it’s _funny_ , it’s ridiculous, because it’s raining hard and Jaehyun has left the patio door open, and there is rain on the inside of the glass. Johnny laughs, genuinely, for the first time in days, and the bubble bursts. 

Johnny follows Jaehyun out and breathes in the oddly cold metallic tinge to the air. Raindrops wet his face and his lips, and they loosen his tongue, maybe, because when Jaehyun looks at him with fondness and says that the summer is weird, Johnny can’t find it in himself to echo it back. He doesn’t pretend. 

“It’s not the summer at all, I’ve wanted you for a long time,” he says. “Since Ibiza. Since before Ibiza.”

Jaehyun doesn’t look surprised, exactly. He just motions for Johnny to join him in the pool, and he moves through the water towards him when Johnny gets in. They have a conversation that Johnny can’t remember, because all he can think is, _he loves me back,_ and there’s a light behind Jaehyun’s eyes that he hasn’t seen in a while; a spark that ignites a fire inside of Johnny and makes him want to feel Jaehyun on his skin, everywhere, always.

He tries to kiss him gently, to really take stock of what is happening, and maybe Jaehyun wants the same, because he moves his mouth carefully over Johnny’s, lips sliding together like they’re slow dancing. They kiss in the pool for a long time, until it isn’t raining anymore, and then they kiss for even longer out of the pool.

In the summer house, they peel off damp shorts that stick to their skin, and warm each other back up the best way they know how, grinding against each other until they’re both hard and breathless. Johnny presses Jaehyun down against the guest bed in there and bites down on his bottom lip.

Jaehyun says, “I like it when you’re kind of rough,” and lifts his hips off the bed to prove his point, which feels fucking amazing, and it makes Johnny curse under his breath. 

He focuses his attention on Jaehyun’s neck, first the soft skin underneath his ear and then the pulse point racing under his skin. He sucks down gently on the skin just below there, and again above Jaehyun’s collarbone. He tastes like fresh cream and strawberries, or maybe just chlorine. It doesn’t matter, it all tastes like heaven on Jaehyun’s body. Johnny grazes his teeth over Jaehyun’s shoulder and moans when Jaehyun’s hand finds its way between them and he takes hold of Johnny’s cock tightly, working him over as Johnny licks into his mouth. 

When they fuck, Johnny kisses him rough but rolls his hips with hesitation. “We can do it differently tomorrow,” he promises Jaehyun. “We have plenty of time.” 

“I like it this way too,” Jaehyun tells him, honeyd lips at Johnny’s ear. “I’ve thought about it every way, rough, slow, whatever.”

“Yeah? Me too.” Johnny pushes up Jaehyun’s knee and pulls out of him almost completely, and then in again, agonisingly slow, relishing in the change of pressure against him. Fucking Jaehyun’s mouth is mind-blowing, but fucking him like this is on another level of amazing, and he can see his face like this, eyes closed, mouth slack as Johnny fucks him. It makes him want to live in this moment forever.

“They say the temperature might stay this high until late October.” Johnny stretches out, naked and warm, next to Jaehyun afterwards. “It’s the longest summer in recent history.”

Jaehyun contemplates this. Says, “When it ends, will we still be doing this?” He sounds hopeful, and Johnny wants to roll over and hold him, but it’s just too damn hot.

“I hope so.” Johnny looks at him. His lashes look impossibly long in the dusky light. “Until then, we have the pool and we have champagne chilling in the house, and nothing else to do but enjoy it.”

“Ah, how great it is to be young, rich and beautiful.” Jaehyun’s being sarcastic and it makes Johnny laugh.

“And in love?” Johnny wants to make sure. He doesn’t want to pretend anymore.

“Yeah.” Jaehyun smiles. “In love.”

Outside, the sun is setting. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

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